


The Pain Pays Our Dues (And Some Of Us, We Have Tattoos)

by icewhisper



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, Tattooed Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-26 05:14:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21368728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icewhisper/pseuds/icewhisper
Summary: When nightmares pushed him out of bed, Steve would walk. One night, he walked into a tattoo shop.It wasn't the only time he did.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers & Avengers Team
Comments: 20
Kudos: 187





	The Pain Pays Our Dues (And Some Of Us, We Have Tattoos)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Painted His Own Nature Into His Pictures](https://archiveofourown.org/works/422533) by [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins). 

> This fic was hugely inspired by Painted His Own Nature Into His Pictures by reena_jenkins, a beautiful fic/podfic about Steve getting tattoos that I am kind of obsessed with. It woke up a need for me to write some tattooed!Steve of my own, so...

Steve didn't sleep much. For all the half-hearted cracks about having had his fill of it in the ice, the truth was a little harsher. Nightmares shocked him awake most nights, lost and terrified, with his heart pounding and his brain utterly convinced that he was still in 1945. He wasn't. He never was. Where he was changed — his floor in the Tower, his apartment in Brooklyn, too many rooms and none of them were _home _— but the nightmares...

The train.

The Valkyrie.

Nightmares of him trapped in ice and too frozen solid to open his mouth and _scream_.

"The date is September 9, 2012," Jarvis would chime from his Stark phone before listing his coordinates so that his brain had to focus on numbers to find the location. He'd repeat it until Steve told him to stop.

He never went back to sleep after the dreams, though. Feet shoved into shoes and clenched fists shoved into pockets, he'd walk. He’d find a gym if he could and wander the streets when he couldn't.

On the worst nights, he walked from Manhattan to Brooklyn, aching for familiar streets and shops he’d never see again.

The tattoo parlor was lit up the night he went out, open way too late or way too early. He wasn't sure why he even went in, positive that he'd have someone grunting at him that they were closed and to get the hell out.

They didn't. The guy behind the counter was tattooed and pierced in ways that still managed to shock Steve with spider webs crawling up his neck and onto his shaved head. Rings punched through skin. Earrings that stretched his lobes out to something that looked unnatural.

The guy stared at him, jaw a little slack. "Captain America did not just walk into my tattoo shop," he muttered to himself. "I've fallen asleep at the desk again and Soph is gonna scream at me about not staying open this late."

"No," Steve coughed, awkward and uncomfortable, because he'd never get used to people being awestruck by him. Never. "Steve Rogers. I'm...out of uniform."

"_Steve Rogers_ did not just walk into my tattoo shop," the guy corrected, but there was the hint of a startled smirk curling pierced lips. "You lookin' for a tat?"

He didn't think he was. If scars couldn't stick around on his body for more than a few days, he doubted ink would. Nothing stayed to remind him where he came from these days, he thought morosely, but still found himself saying, "Yeah. If you're open."

"Are you kidding me? I'd rip out my Prince Albert before I said no to inking America's golden boy."

Thirty seconds later, Steve would regret asking what a Prince Albert was.

The needle hurt, a sharp pain that seemed to stab into him as the tattoo artist – Manny – traced the pattern into his skin. It wasn’t the worst he’d ever felt, didn’t even rank in the top ten, but it pulled his focus away from the phantom chill of the ice seeping into his bones. He turned his head towards it, watching as lines formed.

“I feel like I’m supposed to be saying you saved my grandfather or asking about your story,” Manny confessed as he twisted to dip the needle back into the ink.

“Bit refreshing not to hear it, honestly.”

Manny hummed in agreement and brought the needle back to the skin of his bicep. “Don’t think there’s a school out there that doesn’t cover you once someone brings up World War Two,” he agreed, but he still gave him a careful look. “Doesn’t mean you can’t talk if you wanna, though. Plenty of people talk more here than they probably do with their shrink. Same rules, even if it ain’t official. But no pressure.”

Steve believed him more than he believed the therapist SHIELD had assigned to him. The therapist they’d given him was nice, older and feeling more like a grandfather ready to retire than someone that should be working for a covert agency, but Steve still sat through their sessions with his mouth closed and trying to politely keep his eyes off the clock. If he went at all. He was pretty sure he’d skipped more appointments than he’d attended.

Professional versus… Steve wasn’t sure he could call Manny’s appearance unprofessional, considering where he worked, but it was different. Different look. Different atmosphere.

For a second, he considered talking. Considered telling Manny about the sniper rifle the man was drawing into his skin, but talking about the tattoo meant talking about who it was for and Steve… Steve hadn’t said Bucky’s name since he woke up, hadn’t talked about him to a soul, and he wasn’t sure he could do it without shattering to pieces.

Manny didn’t seem offended by his silence, at least, and let it stretch.

He didn’t say anything when Steve got to see the tattoo in the mirror and choked on a breath.

He also didn’t let Steve pay.

“Man, I never charge vets on their first tat. Put your damn wallet away.”

Steve still tipped him.

Manny said it was enough to pay his rent for a month and called him insane.

The tattoo itched the first day, but it was healed by the second. Healed and…there. It was still there.

He traced the butt of the rifle and finally let himself cry.

Steve had barely finished high school, helped along by long nights studying with Bucky and teachers that were as sympathetic to his illnesses as they were ready to simply get him out of their hair. He’d never been a good student, too busy with fights he’d never win and doodling in corners of exams when he didn’t have the answers. The only reason he’d ever even attempted college was because they had art classes, but even then, all he’d really wanted to do was draw. The coursework side of it…

The point was that he’d never understood much outside of art. Listening to Howard and Erskine talk about the serum and the procedure had been a test to everybody’s patience when it kept going straight over his head. It was practical application that taught him about his metabolism and the way his body healed, not reports and diagrams.

He didn’t understand why it took the tattoo a week before the ink began to fade. Wondered if maybe his body had understood it wasn’t a harm to him or if it just hadn’t known what to do about ink.

Still, when he looked in the mirror one morning and saw that the serial number beneath the rifle was suddenly too light to read…

Jarvis had to pull him back with his mantra of date, location, and a reminder that Steve was safe.

“What time does Brookl-Ink open?”

“11am, sir.”

He had a therapy appointment at 11:30.

The bell at Brookl-Ink dinged at 11:05 and he gave Manny a strained smile. “You got any openings today?”

“Back already?”

Steve shrugged out of his jacket and pushed up the sleeve of his t-shirt. “Super soldier,” he offered when Manny’s eyes went wide. “I heal fast.”

Manny didn’t have an opening until later that afternoon. Truthfully, Steve didn’t think he’d had an opening at all and had sacrificed his break instead, but they didn’t bring it up. Manny went over the tattoo again and added more shading around it the second time. Bigger. More elaborate.

“It’ll just fade,” Steve tried to argue. “You’re wasting ink.”

“Who knows? Maybe if we pump enough into you, your body will get used to it,” Manny joked and swiped away the excess.

Manny still didn’t let him pay, waving him off with some lifetime guarantee on the ink that Steve knew was an outright lie.

Steve tipped him even more the second time.

The thing was, Manny wasn’t wrong. He’d said it as a joke, but somewhere around the seventh time Steve got the tattoo touched up, he realized it wasn’t fading. One week. Two. Three. He went to the shop after a month and grinned wide at Manny.

That time, he got Peggy’s signature – copied off an old report Fury had given him – scrawled across his collarbone.

The SSR eagle on a shoulder blade.

The date they’d formed the Howling Commandos down the inside of a bicep.

His mother’s birthday over his heart.

Tattoo after tattoo, he got and the more he went, the more the ink seemed to settle in his skin and _stay_. Halfway through a tattoo on Steve’s rib – an oversized compass surrounded in roses – Manny pointed out that they hadn’t had to do a color touchup in months.

Steve smiled the rest of the appointment.

“You sure you’re doing okay?” Manny asked him one night. “This one’s kinda morbid.”

It wasn’t as if Steve wasn’t aware. He’d drawn that one himself, a 3-D showing of skin torn open to show a crooked spine underneath. They’d laid it out in blacks and grays except for the underside of bloody skin and sinew.

Steve hummed softly, body heavy in exhaustion, and wondering if he could fall asleep to the feeling of the needle going down his back. He hadn’t slept in days. “Gotta face your demons sometime,” he said, because maybe the person he’d been before was still trapped under skin that didn’t always feel like his. Didn’t always, but more and more every day as they covered too-perfect skin with art.

“Anyone ever tell you you’ve got problems?” Manny asked with the ease of someone that had gone from tattooist to friend a while ago.

“A few.”

“Okay. Just checking.”

Clint was the first one to notice one day when they’d broken up from a mass training session – sans Thor, who was still on Asgard – and Steve had pulled the bottom of his shirt up to wipe the sweat off his face.

“Is that- Do you have _tattoos_?”

Steve paused, sweaty shirt still caught in his hands and exposing the lower half of his torso. “Um. Yes?” He hadn’t thought it would be something noteworthy. He’d seen the tribal design Clint had up his left calf and he was pretty sure he’d seen a tiny, red spider tattooed on Natasha’s hip like some kind of ironic birthmark. Tony had mentioned a tattoo once and said the only one that got to see it anymore was Pepper.

Steve didn’t know where it was and he didn’t want to know. He’d been more careful about asking questions since he’d asked Manny about a Prince Albert and, these days, he kept his mouth shut and googled what he didn’t know.

He still had to figure out how to clear out his search history before someone – mostly Tony – went snooping and asked about _what is two girls one cup_.

He’d searched it when he heard a couple college-aged boys talking about it in a Starbucks. He’d both immediately regretted it, the link he’d tapped by mistake when someone bumped into his chair, and the fact that the volume on his phone had been turned on. _Loud_.

“I’m sorry. Cap’s got _what_?”

And there was Tony and the reminder that the rules seemed to be different for him.

He let go of his shirt as everyone’s eyes focused on him and his exposed skin. “Tattoos, Tony,” he sighed. He could go for the door, but Bruce was in the way and still looking a little green. Less Hulk. More nausea. Either way, he didn’t want to get too close.

“Tattoos,” Tony repeated. “As in plural?”

“Yes?” He gave Tony an odd look and turned his right arm so that they could see the date scrawled down his bicep. Half of it was hidden by the sleeve of his t-shirt, so he lifted it up to show the rest. “It’s not like I try to hide them.”

“Is that a Johnson?” Natasha asked, suddenly closer to him than he remembered her being a second ago. To his credit, he didn’t jump or clench his jaw too tight at the way she was looking at the one he’d exposed on his shoulder.

“Yeah.”

She hummed, considering. “It’s nice work. Local?”

“Brooklyn.”

“How did you get the ink to stay?” Bruce asked, curiosity winning out over the food poisoning he’d been dealing with. “I would have thought the serum would heal it.”

Steve shrugged a shoulder. “Continued exposure? I think my body got used to it.” Far as he could tell, the tattoos had become part of his skin. Their last battle – against robots, because his life wasn’t weird enough – he’d taken a hit that cut through the Kevlar of his uniform and into his skin. It had cut directly into the tattoo of the rifle Natasha was still staring at. The bleeding had stopped by the end of the battle, already well on its way to healing before Bruce could de-Hulk and start making noises about stitches.

He’d expected it to heal and see clean skin interrupting the lines of Bucky’s gun.

It didn’t.

The tattoo was intact when he woke up the next morning.

Bruce looked fascinated in a way that told him he wouldn’t be going near Bruce _or_ Tony’s labs for the foreseeable future.

“I’m still stuck on _Captain America_ having _tattoos_,” Tony said and Steve wasn’t sure if he was just taking enjoyment in Steve’s embarrassment at being the center of attention or that Steve had managed to shatter the good-boy image people always tried to stick him with. Either way, he looked entirely too amused, even if it was peppered with shock.

“How many?” Clint asked, curious as he tilted his head to get a better look at the date on his arm. He didn’t ask about it, which Steve appreciated. He didn’t want to start going through the story of each and every design.

“Lost count,” he admitted.

“You have enough tattoos that you _lost count_,” Tony repeated as Clint and Natasha’s brows went up. Bruce just looked even more curious. “Alright, Capsicle, that’s it. Shirt off. Pants off. Whatever. We wanna see.”

“No.” He pushed his sleeve back down to cover the rifle again and bent to pick up his shield from where he’d set it down. “I didn’t get them for show-and-tell, Tony.”

“So why did you get them?” Natasha asked, voice soft in that way it got when she was being a friend instead of a spy; careful and a little unsure, like she was still getting used to the idea of having friends instead of marks

_For me_, he wanted to say, _because it’s the only thing that kept me from losing my mind after I woke up._

He shrugged instead, but there was a sad twist to his smile that quieted even Tony.

It wasn’t that he tried to hide the tattoos, because he didn’t. The tattoos had become part of his story, ink bringing ghosts back to life in the only way he could anymore. They were desperate grabs to hold onto what he’d lost and immortalize them as he tried to find who he was _now_.

He didn’t think it was his fault the others hadn’t noticed. It was far from the first time he’d worn short sleeves around them. Besides, while the Howlies and the army had all but beaten any modesty out of him during the war, it would also never be in his nature to run around without his shirt.

No matter what Natasha said with raised eyebrows and teasing comments, his workout shirts _were_ shirts, thank you very much.

He and Manny had been discussing the idea of bringing his tattoos further down his arms, debating between separate tattoos or full sleeves, but they were still only talking. His ink wasn’t done for aesthetics’ sake. He’d spent hours in a chair, because it was the only thing that settled him after he woke up. It was what helped him _deal_.

He could understand the team’s surprise – could even envision the public reaction when his tattoos eventually got noticed. They’d grown up on Captain America while history books ignored years of arrests and disciplinary issues to paint him as some kind of pillar of virtue. It was everything he hadn’t wanted.

“You’re keeping the suit, right?” Bucky had asked him, four and seventy years ago, leant towards him in a bar that didn’t exist anymore.

Some days, he wished he hadn’t, wished he’d traded stars and stripes for the uniforms his team wore, because all he’d ever wanted was to be like them. He’d never wanted the fanfare that came with a title he still wasn’t sure he’d actually earned, even after everything.

He stepped out of the shower with a sigh, mirror fogged, because no matter how much time passed, he didn’t think he’d ever be able to shower without the water set to blistering. He swiped a hand across the glass and stared at himself.

The tattoos were there, colors bright against heat-reddened skin. His fingers traced over Peggy’s signature on his collarbone, over the fondue fork he’d gotten on his side for Howard, over his mother’s birthdate on his chest.

He grasped at the sniper rifle on his arm, covering it up like he was protecting it. Natasha had stared at it the way she stared through him sometimes. He thought she knew, because Russian childhood aside, she’d been in the US long enough – had worked with _Coulson_ long enough – to know the history.

He understood people having questions about them. They saw tattoos and they wanted to know the stories behind them, because there had to be a story if it was important enough to ink into skin. That didn’t mean he wanted to tell them, didn’t want to tear his chest open the way the tattoo on his back tore his skin open to expose _his_ ghost.

He pulled on a fresh t-shirt that still showed half of the date on his bicep, because he wasn’t hiding. He wouldn’t cover himself up like he was ashamed, he told himself. They could ask, but that didn’t mean he had to tell them, not unless he wanted to.

He ended up explaining Bucky’s tattoo at Clint’s birthday party, tongue loosened by the mead Thor had brought from Asgard. By morning, he couldn’t quite remember _what_ he’d said, but he remembered crying and Thor raising a toast to a fallen brother.

He remembered not being able to find the words to explain that Bucky was so much more than that and how lost he still felt.

The next time he saw Manny, it was to put the date of the Avenger’s forming around his left wrist in Roman numerals and the “A” inked into the underside. The blue behind the letter was oddly reminiscent of the Tesseract’s blue, but as it healed and the ink settled into his skin, he didn’t feel as haunted by it as he’d expected to be.

The others noticed it a week later when they’d all managed to get together to watch a movie.

The media noticed it about a month after that when he rolled his sleeves up at a press event and lost their collective shit.

He told Bucky about it three years later while they sat in Brookl-Ink and Manny added the date Bucky came _home_ below the rifle.

Bucky laughed and Steve relaxed into the chair, watching him with an easy grin as the needle traced along his skin. “Jerk.”

"Punk."

The End


End file.
